Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

They drove back to Manhattan in silence, with Teresa holding Thomas’s hand and occasionally bringing it up to her lips and kissing it, marking out her possessions.

When they came off the bridge, Rudolph said, ‘Well get out here, Tom.’

‘You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?’ Thomas said.

‘It’s the best Chinese food in town,’ Teresa said. The ride had been neutral, she no longer felt in danger of being attacked, she could afford to be hospitable, perhaps in the future there was an advantage there for her. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

‘I have to get home,’ Gretchen-said. Her voice was quivering, on the point of hysteria. ‘I just must get home.’

If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, Rudolph would have-stayed with Thomas. After the noise of the evening, the public triumph, and battering, it seemed sad and lonely to leave Thomas merely to go off to supper with his twittering wife, anonymous in the night, unsaluted, uncheered. He would have to make it up to Thomas another time.

The driver stopped the car and Gretchen and Rudolph got out. ‘Goodbye for now, in-laws,’ Teresa said, and laughed.

‘Five o’clock tomorrow, Rudy,’ Thomas said and Rudolph nodded.

‘Good night,’ Gretchen whispered. Take care of yourself, please.’

The taxi moved off and Gretchen gripped Rudolph’s arm, as though to steady herself. Rudolph stopped a cruising cab and

gave the driver Gretchen’s address. Once in the darkness of the cab, Gretchen broke down. She threw herself into Rudolph’s arms and wept uncontrollably, her body racked by great sobs. The tears came to Rudolph’s eyes, too, and he held his sister tightly, stroking her hair. In the back of the dark cab, with the lights of the city streaking past the windows, erratically illuminating, in bursts of coloured neon, the contorted, lovely tear-stained face, he felt closer to Gretchen, bound in stricter love, than ever before.

The tears finally stopped. Gretchen sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Tm sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m such a hateful snob. That poor boy, that poor, poor boy … ‘

The baby-sitter was asleep on the couch in the livingroom when they came into the apartment. Willie hadn’t come in yet. There had been no calls, the baby-sitter said. Billy had read himself to sleep quietly, and she had gone up and turned off his light without awakening him. She was a girl of about seventeen, a highschool student, bobby-soxed, pretty, in a snub-nosed, shy way, and embarrassed at being caught asleep. Gretchen poured two Scotches and soda. The baby-sitter had straightened out the room and the newspapers, which had been strewn around, were now in a neat pile on the window sill and the cushions were pumped out.

There was only one lamp lit and they sat in shadow, Gretchen with her feet curled up under her on the couch, Rudolph in a large easy chair. They drank slowly, exhausted, blessing the silence. They finished their drinks and silently Rudolph rose from his chair and refilled the glasses, sat down again.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, somebody else’s accident,

‘He enjoyed it,’ Gretchen said finally. ‘When that boy was practically helpless and he hit him so many times. I always thought - when I thought anything about it - that it was just a man earning a living - in a peculiar way - but just that. It wasn’t like that at all tonight, was it?’

‘It’s a curious profession,’ Rudolph said. ‘It’s hard to know what really must be going on in a man’s head up there.’

‘Weren’t you ashamed?’

‘Put it this way,’ Rudolph said. ‘I wasn’t happy. There must be at least ten thousand boxers in the United States. They have to come from somebody’s family.’

‘I don’t think like you,’ Gretchen said coldly.

‘No, you don’t’

‘Those sleazy purple trunks,’ she said, as though by finding an object on which she could fix her revulsion, she could exorcise the complex horror of the entire night. She shook her head against memory. ‘Somehow I feel it’s our fault, yours, mine, our parents’, that Tom was up there in that vile place.’

Rudolph sipped at his drink in silence. I wouldn’t know, Tom had said in the dressing room, being on the outside the way I was.. Excluded, he had reacted as a boy in the most simple, brutal way, with his fists. Older, he had merely continued. They all had their father’s blood in them, and Axel Jordache had killed two men. As far as Rudolph knew, Tom at least hadn’t killed anybody. Perhaps the strain was ameliorating.

‘Ah, what a mess,’ Gretchen said. ‘All of us. Yes, you, too. Do you enjoy anything, Rudy?’

‘I don’t think of things in those terms,’ he said,

The commercial monk,’ Gretchen said harshly. ‘Except that instead of poverty, you’ve taken the vow of wealth. Which is better in the long run?’

‘Don’t talk like a fool, Gretchen.’ Now he was sorry he had come upstairs with her.

‘And the two others,’ she continued. ‘Chastity and obedience. Chaste for our Virgin Mother’s sake - is that it? Obedience to Duncan Calderwood, the Pope of Whitby’s Chamber of Commerce?’

‘That’s all going to change now,’ Rudolph said, but he was unwilling to defend himself further.

‘You’re going to go over the wall, Father Rudolph? You’re going to marry, you’re going to wallow in the fleshpots, you’re going to tell Duncan Calderwood to go fuck himself?’

Rudolph stood up and went over and poured some more soda into’ his glass, biting back his anger. ‘It’s silly, Gretchen,’ he said, as calmly as possible, ‘to take tonight out on me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but her voice was still hard. ‘Ah -I’m the worst of the lot. I live with a man I despise, I do work that’s mean spirited and piddling and useless, I’m New York’s easiest lay… Do I shock you, brother?’ she said mockingly.

‘I think you’re giving yourself a title you haven’t earned,’ Rudolph said.

‘Joke,’ Gretchen said. ‘Do you want a list? Beginning with Johnny Heath? Do you think he’s been so good to you because of your shining bright eyes?’

‘What does Willie think about all this?’ Rudolph asked,

ignoring the jibe. No matter how it had started and for whatever reasons, Johnny Heath was now his friend.

‘Willie doesn’t think about anything but infesting bars and occasionally screwing some drunken broad and getting by in this world with as little work and as little honour as possible. If he somehow was given the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, his first thought would be which sponsors he could sell it to at the highest price to advertise vacation tours to Mount Sinai.’

Rudolph laughed and despite herself Gretchen had to laugh, too. There’s nothing like a failing marriage,’ she said, ‘to bring out flights of rhetoric’

Rudolph’s laughter was part relief. Gretchen had switched targets and he no longer was under attack. ‘Does Willie know what your opinion is of him?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ Gretchen said. ‘He agrees with it. That’s the worst thing about him. He says there’s not a man or a woman or a thing in this world that he admires, especially himself. He’d be deeply dissatisfied with himself, he told me, if he was anything but a failure. Beware romantic men.’ ‘Why do you live with him?’ Rudolph asked bluntly. ‘Do .you remember the note I sent you saying I was in a mess and I wanted to see you?’

‘Yes,’ Rudolph remembered it very well, remembered that whole day very well. When he had come down to New York the next week and asked Gretchen what the trouble was she had said, ‘Nothing, it’s blown over.’

‘I’d more or less decided I wanted to ask Willie for a divorce,’ Gretchen said, ‘and I wanted your advice.’ ‘What changed your mind?’